Woven

Understanding the Bible as One Seamless Story

Angie Smith

• Publisher: B&H Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781087722269
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Does the Bible feel confusing and complicated to you? Perhaps some of it feels familiar, but overall, does it feel impossible to navigate? Maybe you recognize the stories, but you just don't know how they all fit together. Yet they do fit together. In her unique and remarkably readable way, Angie Smith—bestselling author of What Women Fear, Mended, I Will Carry You, and Seamless —helps you tie together all the loose, disconnected threads you find in the Bible, weaving them into a beautifully crafted storyline. After reading Woven, when it comes to reading Scripture, you'll go:

• From confused to confident
• From lost to knowledgeable
• From separate stories to the One they are all about

Because once you see the big picture, you'll see it on every page. Every time.

Chapter 1

The Time I Scared Little Kids’ Parents

I was in my early twenties when a couple of new friends invited me to a Bible study. I didn’t have a clue what that was, but it sounded equal parts intriguing and horrifying, so I agreed to go.

I didn’t think of myself as stupid. I was actually in grad school at the time and was the kind of person who didn’t give up on anything until I completely understood it. I held impressive college degrees, had published my own academic papers, and was on full scholarship to one of the most prestigious schools in the country—all at the ripe young age of twenty-three. (As writers, we have editors who sometimes add in sentences that make us sound more exciting than we are. Which is why I left in that last one.)

All I needed to do, these girls told me, was go down to the local Christian bookstore and buy a copy of some workbook that we were going to be covering. Sounded simple enough.

So, one day after classes, I drove downtown and found the place. But I realized fairly quickly that this was the kind of parking lot where you turn down the sound of the Beastie Boys when you pull in. I took one look at the posters and the window displays and saw that these were not my people. So I left.

Still, I went to the Bible study anyway, sans workbook. Wasn’t a problem. The leader was the kind of southern girl who didn’t show up without extra snacks and workbooks. So we all sat on the floor, and I marveled at the whole awkward scene. The lady on the video we were watching would say something like, “Turn to Isaiah, chapter fifty-three,” and all fifteen of the other girls opened their Bibles to that exact page simultaneously. Or at least I’m pretty sure I’m remembering that correctly. So, all over again, it was like I was back in that store parking lot, on the outside looking in, wondering how a girl with my past and my problems and my obvious lack of experience with how Bible studies operate was going to make it through the rest of the evening, much less several more weeks of this business, which I’d been told would be the expected time frame.

But I was determined to stick with it. I’m Italian. I had my workbook now. I kind of understood the order of stuff (prayer, talking, snacks, video, more talking, more snacks, more prayer, etc.). So between that night and the time of the next week’s meeting, I dug out the only copy of the Bible I owned. (Laugh at your discretion. It was a “Precious Moments” edition.) I spent about an hour and a half attaching sticky notes inside it, marking the pages where the workbook said we’d be looking up Bible verses during the upcoming session.

Ha! I had this.

The visual of me walking into that Bible study after a class on applied linear statistical models still makes me laugh. (Yes, that was the name of a real class, and I was the teaching assistant. God bless those kids. I basically showed up with cute hair and acted like I knew what I was doing. This particular strategy has always served me well.) But, oh, sweet little Angie—you really thought you could pull the same tricks with Christianity, didn’t you?

That’s how it went. Week after week. I planned on adding it to my résumé of adventures and education.

What I didn’t plan on was falling in love with Jesus.

But the nerd in me is never too far away, so I did what any logical person would do. Except not at all. I braved the bookstore. Only I didn’t run straight to the four-inch-thick books the way I would’ve done if I was investigating most other subjects. Instead, I went and sat crisscross-applesauce in the kids’ area and pulled out Bibles written for four-year-olds, right there with the stuffed vegetables that were entertaining the (other?) kids around me.

And despite the fact that a few moms were probably keeping a closer eye on their kids than they’d been doing before I got there, it was actually a roaring success. I even bought a couple of those Bible storybooks. And, I swear, I’ll never forget the indescribably sweet season of time that followed, when I’d come home to my little apartment after school each day, head out on my balcony, open up those brightly colored Bibles, and read the amazing stories someone had rewritten for the children in their life.

All of a sudden, I realized there was a story in the Bible.

I know—and, again, God bless those sweet college students. I’m sorry their parents paid 1903758302 dollars for them to go to Vanderbilt and learn about the importance of applying texturing spray before flat ironing.

Up until then, for example, I’d hear a story about, oh . . . Samson, let’s say. Samson and Delilah. I remember knowing that Delilah was bad. No clue where I learned it. I also knew the same about Jezebel. I did not know Jezebel would be eaten by dogs later, but that’s for another book. I knew some of these names, but I didn’t have any idea where they fell in the story of Scripture. Samson was super-strong, maybe not the brightest guy, whose girlfriend tricked him into letting her cut his hair because she knew he would lose all his power until it grew back, and she stood to make a killing in bribe money if she could pull it off. That’s a good one. Who knew his hair would grow back and he’d end up pushing down the main supporting beams of a big building one day with his bare hands and kill a bunch of people, himself included. The little kids’ books naturally didn’t go into great detail on all of this, but . . .

Okay, I would think, when I’d come across Samson in my Bible now, or in a teaching that I’d heard. Samson goes HERE . . . in the book of Judges . . . and the judges came between the time of JOSHUA (when Israel entered the Promised Land) and SAMUEL (the last judge), who ushered in the first Israelite kings, Saul and David.

Samson, Samuel, Joshua, King Saul—they stopped being for me these disembodied names who just floated around somewhere inside my rough, raw-data knowledge base of the Bible. Slowly but surely, I started growing in my ability to pin the stories, events, and details of their lives into the spots they actually occupied in Scripture.

And from there, anchored around those pins, I could start to draw lines tying them together. And the more lines I drew—between more and more of these happenings and sayings and key moments that stood out to me from the Bible—all those loose, straggly threads of connection began to flatten out for me, weaving themselves (oh, my gosh, I cannot stop—is there a hotline for this sort of thing?), yes, weaving themselves around each other.

That’s when I saw it. It was all one story. It is all one story. Sixty-six books, and yet all one story.

I still can’t quite describe for you how empowering this discovery felt to me, and feels to me even now. By no means did I turn into an overnight Bible scholar. In an unexpected turn of events, I am still not a Bible scholar. But I act confident, and that helps.

So here we go.

Couple of things first, by way of caveat: (1) We won’t be covering everything. What we’re embarking on here is a flyover. We’ll be picking out the big landmarks of the Bible together, as well as the significant pathways and patterns that run between them. And while we’ll hover over several important points to take a closer look, the main purpose of this journey is to get the general lay of the land. By the time we touch down again at the end of these pages, you’ll walk away with an insider’s awareness on the grand story of Scripture. You’ll have seen it with your own eyes.

Also, (2) We won’t be solving every theological question. Maybe that’ll be the next book you read. Maybe you’ll jump from here into exploring a particular theme or doctrine from the Bible, wanting to find out how someone else interprets it. Bright, well-intentioned believers can come to various conclusions on a lot of different things, as you know, and God gives us plenty of leeway to seek him together despite our areas of healthy debate. But we won’t be doing any debating in this book. Not that I don’t have my own reasoned, prayerful opinions on stuff, but the main thing I’m praying for on this trip is for clear skies. If we clog it up with extra baggage, with distracting sidebar arguments, we’ll never get there.

And this time, friend, we’re getting there. Wherever you’ve felt the need to cover for your lack of biblical fluency, whether real or self-perceived, those days are now coming to a quick and confident end. Granted, you’ll never know everything there is to know. We weren’t created with the capability for articulating all the mysteries of God. But the Author of this story didn’t write it for only a handful of experts to understand while it baffles the rest of us. He wrote it for you, and for me, knowing that he created us to understand it with no need for commentaries and seminars. Those are great, but those are extras.

So why aren’t we looking at Genesis yet, Angie?

Hang on. We’re close.

It’s because I really do have a couple more important things to say at the outset.

First, remember the Bible is real. Now I know you knew that, but because we rightly use the language of “story” to talk about what’s written in Scripture, the temptation at least exists to treat it as mere literature or as some sort of mythology. And I want to dismiss that thought entirely, even in how you approach this little book I’ve written about the Bible.

Second, read it with the end in mind. I’m assuming at this point that the biblical roadmap feels a bit fuzzy and disjointed for you. That’s okay. That’s why we’re here. But at the end of this chapter, I’ve included a two-page, nicely designed layout of the seamless story line of Scripture. And I encourage you to keep turning to it, all along the way. Familiarize yourself with it. Know where we’re going.

It’s not cheating.

Because when we start, we’ll be...

Table of contents

• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Time I Scared Little Kids’ Parents
• Chapter 2: That’s Good—No, That’s Bad
• Chapter 3: Let’s Try This Again, Shall We?
• Chapter 4: This Old (Family) Man
• Chapter 5: Twins, Tricks, and a Tragic Hero
• Chapter 6: Hello, We Were Just Leaving
• Chapter 7: Dancing with Disobedience
• Chapter 8: Canaan, Here We Come
• Chapter 9: How the Mighty Have Fallen
• Chapter 10: You Might Want to Listen to This
• Chapter 11: And the Weaver Became Flesh
• Chapter 12: Like He Always Said He Would
• Chapter 13: Just Try Stopping Us Now
• Chapter 14: The Big Finish
• Notes